Miyamoto: Abundance of Shooters at E3 2014 is a “Revelation of Creative Immaturity”

July 3, 2014
Written by Jason Dunning

During Nintendo’s recent 74th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders, Legendary Nintendo developer Shigeru Miyamoto spoke out about E3 2014, revealing how he thinks most titles at the event were bloody shooters:

Every year a number of companies exhibit at E3 and Nintendo is compared with other companies, most likely with Sony and Microsoft. This year, the majority of what the other developers exhibited was bloody shooter software that was mainly set in violent surroundings or, in a different sense, realistic and cool worlds. Because so many software developers are competing in that category, it seemed like most of the titles at the show were of that kind.

Clearly he’s referencing games like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Battlefield: Hardline, Far Cry 4, and Rainbow Six: Siege, and later in the Q&A, Miyamoto called the abundance of shooters “a revelation of creative immaturity:”

This is something I mentioned earlier today (during my remarks on E3) but to some, it might have seemed as though there wasn’t a wide variety of software at E3, and as though many people followed the same direction to make their video games. I believe this is a revelation of creative immaturity on our part as creators in the video game industry.

He later added, “My comment may be at risk of being misinterpreted, but in the digital content field, I think that our creativity is still immature. In the world of comic books and movies, there are people who are challenging themselves to be even more creative than before in creating their content. I believe that we (those who are creating digital content called video games) are still in a transitional period and will eventually step up into the phases where we expand and enrich the substance of our creativity.”